THOUGHTS, DREAMS & ACTION

If we’re going to get through the next few years, we need a change of narrative so profound that our entire culture changes direction. We need not just new stories, but a whole new shape to what a story is. And it will start with our writing.

THOUGHTS | DREAMS | ACTION

If we’re going to get through the next few years, we need a change of narrative so profound that our entire culture changes direction. We need not just new stories, but a whole new shape to what a story is. And it will start with our writing.

A Darkness of Knights

Knights in the Middle Ages loved their tournaments. Scores of them toured Europe in a kind of armoured Champions League and nobody loved them more than the two kings, Charles VI and Henry V. There are records also, of knights engaging in underground combat when the tunnels going under the wall were met by the tunnel-wreckers from inside. Finally, we know that on at least one occasion, Henry V was forced to grant mercy to a defender of a besieged town because he had once had the upper hand in combat. The rules of chivalry outweighed the rules of war.

So this story brings both these ideas together with the unproved, but I think reasonable notion that Charles took his natural-born daughter with him as his squire in at least some of his fights: she was trained by someone, after all, and she hated the English with a passion….